


DARE

by sabinelagrande



Category: Sagas of Sundry, Sagas of Sundry: Dread
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Crapsack World, Episode: e004 What Is The True Story? Spoilers, First Time, M/M, Post-Canon, Recreational Drug Use, Slut Shaming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 06:35:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11663604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabinelagrande/pseuds/sabinelagrande
Summary: Kayden, Sat, a bottle of cheap whiskey, and Tanner.





	DARE

There is no grave for Tanner, but that doesn't stop Kayden and Sat from getting fucked up in a cemetery.

Over the course of their friendship, Sat and Kayden have gotten fucked up in cemeteries on numerous occasions; it's quiet and it's spooky and the old one at the church by the river has no guards. It's an easy hop over a gate, and then the two of them are sitting up against a weathered angel, passing a bottle of cheap whiskey back and forth.

It's sort of calm tonight, not that Kayden thinks he'll ever think of night as calm again. The gravel road to the cemetery dead-ends in front of it, so there are no cars to pass by, no lights to be seen. No one lives within miles. Out here there is nothing but Kayden, Sat, and the dead.

So, just the dead.

"I miss him," Sat says, breaking the stillness. Kayden doesn't ask who; all of them were at the memorial service earlier, and if it felt like another occasion they'd point back to as the last time they saw each other, he was good enough not to mention it.

"Yeah," he says, because it's the best he can do, the most committal he can be, though he's done nothing but agree that Sat misses him.

"There's one part I never quite got a handle on," she says, and Kayden laughs.

"Just the one?" he says, and she socks him on the arm.

"Why was he always so convinced that you drugged all of us?" she asks, undeterred. "He kept harping on that long after it stopped making sense."

"It was what he needed to believe," Kayden says. "He had to have an easy answer, and blaming me always did the trick for him."

She looks at him with that face she gets when she smells bullshit; it hurts a little when he realizes how much he's missed it over the past year. "That's not it."

He takes a long drink of whiskey while he thinks about it. He made a promise, but the only other party to it is dead. He's seen dead things come back, but he figures that probably won't include Tanner calling him on the carpet for telling his secrets.

"Once upon a time, there was a boy named Tanner, who thought he was too good for drugs and wasn't," Kayden says.

\--

It wasn't calm that day. It was busy; Kayden's mom was on a kick of giving a shit about whether he dropped out, so he was actually studying, of all the fucking things to be doing. He was even in the library, of all the fucking places to be doing it. He'd gotten a carrel way in the back, where nobody could watch him flake away pieces of the wooden desk with his pocket knife when he got bored.

He was very bored, so by the time a familiar face appeared over the side of the carrel, there was a messy pile of wood shavings next to his textbook.

"I was going to see if you were working, but I think I have my answer," Tanner said dryly.

Kayden gathered the desk fragments up in his hand and threw the whole thing over his shoulder. "What can I do for you?" he asked.

Tanner looked around, checking the stacks nearby; it was cute when he thought he knew how to be sneaky. "Are you holding?" he asked in a low voice.

Kayden laughed. "I am a walking fucking apothecary."

"If I told you I wanted to smoke pot, would you give it to me?" Tanner asked, and Kayden's eyebrow went up.

"I don't do well with hypothetical questions about drugs," Kayden said, to cover his astonishment that Tanner would ask. It wasn't like Tanner hadn't had every opportunity in the world to smoke if he wanted to, but he'd always passed it up and acted like he didn't even get contact high.

Tanner seemed to steel himself, letting out a huff of air. "I want to smoke pot with you."

Tanner looked offended by how hard Kayden laughed, and then Kayden laughed harder at the look on his face, the little pursed lipped scowl of disapproval. But when Kayden finished wiping his eyes, he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, pulling out a rolled up baggie and flicking it open. 

"Nobody's stopping you," he said, dangling it in Tanner's face, and Tanner rolled his eyes and snatched it out of his hand.

"Don't be an ass," Tanner said, but he didn't give Kayden's stash back, stuffing it into his pocket instead.

Kayden dumped his books unceremoniously into his weathered backpack. "C'mon. I know a place."

\--

"He was so convinced you drugged us because you smoked him out one time?" Sat says, incredulous. "Was it laced?"

Kayden shakes his head. "It wasn't even my good shit. I wasn't wasting anything worth smoking on somebody who might get one puff in and run off to his Bible-thumping parents to tattle on me."

"So that was all it took to make him think you were a predator?" she says. "Some cheap weed?"

"No, but also yes," Kayden said. He sighs, tempted for a moment to reel it back in, make up a new story that sounds like truth. Fuck it. He's already here. He has to do this thing now.

"Kayden," she says softly, and it's just more reason to get the whole thing out.

"I got him high and he took what he wanted," he says, and Sat's eyes go wide.

\--

It was kind of shocking that Tanner wasn't a giggler; maybe that was Kayden projecting, because he laughed too much even when he wasn't high. Instead, Tanner seemed to smoke with a kind of determination, like he was trying to get the most out of the drugs. He mellowed out after a while, and he and Kayden lay side by side, staring up at the unfinished ceiling of the still-under-construction house and passing a joint back and forth.

"Who are you when you're high?" Tanner asked. Kayden almost gave him shit about being a philosophical smoker, but there was something genuine about the question, almost plaintive.

"It goes one of two ways," Kayden said. "Either you're the purest expression of your being or some shit, or you're everything you hate about yourself."

"But who are _you_?" Tanner pressed.

Kayden took a long drag off the joint, holding it before letting the smoke curl out of his mouth. "A guy who needs to buy more drugs."

Kayden turned, looking at Tanner, and he found that Tanner was looking back at him. It was such an easy thing, such a small motion; Kayden realized how close they were together, then Tanner closed the gap between them. Kayden could tell he'd never done this before, but it didn't stop either of them.

\--

"Oh my god," Sat says softly, and Kayden feels it jab into his ribs.

"Don't look at me like that," he says. He wants to throw the whiskey bottle against one of the gravestones, just to hear it crack, but he closes his hand around it instead, squeezing hard for a moment. "Everybody had a good time, and it's not my fucking fault if he had buyer's remorse."

\--

Tanner looked good debauched. Kayden had always wondered if he would, had always thought in the back of his mind that he and Tanner might have something sometime, but Tanner was too uptight to even joke about it. Kayden liked him better this way, with everything fake stripped off. Tanner's shirt was pushed up, the result of Kayden's search for more skin to cover in biting kisses, and his fly hung open, clothes pushed down to frame his cock invitingly. To top it off, he'd ended up with the joint between his lips, and Kayden wondered if anyone would ever see him looking this good again.

Kayden plucked the joint from Tanner's mouth, taking a hit before putting it back and moving down Tanner's body. Just to be an asshole, he blew the smoke out in a long thin stream, his breath ghosting over Tanner's cock. It twitched, and Kayden laughed, the last remnants of the smoke pouring out before he lowered his head and got to work.

Tanner barely lasted any time, but even that felt right, like it was so overwhelming that there was no choice but to break under it. It didn't take long until he was finishing Kayden off, and when it was done Kayden sparked another joint and settled in to wait until his dick got it back together. 

He had nowhere to be, at least nowhere that he'd rather be than this.

\--

"How could you never tell me about this?" Sat asks.

"He didn't want you to know," Kayden says, like it's not a question he's asked himself over and over again. "He didn't want anyone to know. For once I listened." He rubs his forehead, wanting to stop but unable to when it's finally coming out. "He said he didn't really want to do it. He said he never would have done it sober. He said it was my fault for being-"

There are a lot of words that go there, and Kayden has heard them all many times, spoken in anger or in his own head. Easy. Cheap. Slutty. Worthless. 

Meaningless.

\--

Kayden knew he fucked up in the darkroom, two days later. He hadn't seen Tanner around much since what happened, but Kayden cut the only class they had together to drop acid with Sat. Nothing really seemed weird, and he didn't see the problem in slipping into the darkroom just as Tanner went in.

The things Tanner used to develop his photos were not the kinds of chemicals Kayden was experienced with, but Kayden didn't let it stop him this time, walking up behind Tanner. Tanner froze against him, and in the dim red light Kayden could see the mark of a bruise he'd left on Tanner's shoulder. He leaned forward to press his teeth into it again, and all of a sudden Tanner shoved him away, rounding on him.

"Get out," Tanner said flatly.

Kayden laughed. "Sorry if I fucked up your pictures," he said, though he wasn't sorry. "You'll take more."

"Get. Out," Tanner said again. Kayden didn't, and within the space of a minute he regretted not going when he was told.

\--

"Kayden," Sat says gently. "I love Tanner, but nobody gets to treat you like that."

"Like what?" Kayden says. "Normal fucking day for me, wasn't it? Get high and fuck somebody who wouldn't own up to it later? Welcome to my life, ages fourteen to present."

"I know you think you don't deserve anything, but you deserve better than that," she says.

He thinks of all the things he's done, all of them coming to him in a rush, things he did because Black Mountain told him to and things he did because he was high and things he did because he's not a good person. There are piles of them, stacks and stacks, and he doesn't know if anyone but Sat understands that they never go away.

"What have I ever done to earn it?" he asks.

She rolls her eyes. "Be a melodramatic asshole if you want, but I'm not helping."

Kayden laughs; it is not entirely bitter, and it is not entirely happy. "To Tanner," he says, raising the bottle in salute. "May we see him in Hell."

Sat drinks with him but says nothing. He puts an arm around her shoulders and tugs her close, and the quiet of the graveyard descends again, small chirping insects the only thing to fill the silence.

If Kayden tries very hard, he can almost mistake it for peace.


End file.
